Peculiar Ground

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Antony joined Benjie.

  ‘Is that Helen in chain mail?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Benjie. ‘She’s often here. She and Hugo work together.’

  ‘Is that …’

  ‘Awkward? Only a smidgeon. You know how gracefully she backed out of my life. Now she’s sidled back in again. You’ll find the shocking thing about coming back to this place is not how much we’ve moved on, but how much has stayed the same while you’ve been fossicking around in Dracula country.’

  ‘And she lives?’

  ‘In Oxford just now. You’ll be coming across her there. She’s sprucing up one of the college gardens.’

  ‘With Hugo? Are they … I mean.’

  ‘No of course not. No, Helen’s very liberated now, very who-needs-a-man.’

  ‘So what do they do together?’

  ‘They design gardens for the idle rich. He’s got the eye for the big picture; she knows all about plants. The nurseries are here – the proceeds help to keep this place afloat. They’re doing great stuff at Stancombe, scooping out lakes, dividing all the open spaces into secret chambers and mazes, building ruddy great stone walls. The place looks like the labyrinth. What’s surprising really is not that Helen’s here, but the other fellow, the third partner in their gardening outfit. Do you recognise him?’

  Benjie nodded towards an etiolated young man with flaring orange hair, propped against a pilaster in the pose of Hilliard’s pensive youth. Talking to him was Nell’s friend Francesca.

  The greatest stroke of luck that Nell had had at Oxford was that Francesca, and her equally intimidating friend Spiv, had taken her up. They kept a place for her at breakfast time in hall. She didn’t know why. Perhaps they needed her as a foil. She was tongue-tied in their company, but trailed them thankfully. Spiv was half-American, wore knitted hotpants and let it be known she was not constrained by outmoded codes of sexual propriety. Boys who deduced from that that she was an easy lay were likely to be cruelly snubbed. But whether or not she was fast, in the ambiguous sense Nell’s mother used the word (to mean both sluttish and dashing), Spiv was certainly fast-thinking, fast-talking and extremely hard-working. Francesca’s father was a widowed diplomat; she had been playing hostess at the embassy in Rome since her early teens. The inflections of her voice were those of a much older woman. Her exquisitely conventional beauty – hair the colour of ripe wheat, lips as finely shaped and pale as the petals of an Alba Celestial rose – was rendered extra piquant by her habit of delivering, in her regal tones, syntactically perfect jokes of egregious filthiness. She and the redhead, their pearly skins a match, made a fine tableau.

  ‘Yes, I used to know him,’ said Antony. ‘Quite well actually.’

  ‘You’ve probably bought flowers from him. By the station. Wildly Pretty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He grew up on this place. You might remember. Car-mad. Played chauffeur for years before he got his driving licence. His father’s head keeper.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Antony.

  ‘Jack broke the old fellow’s heart by turning out a poofter and now here he is, sipping champagne as though he’d never sat below the salt. Actually he wouldn’t have sat at all. Under the ancien régime keepers and beaters ate their piece out in the stables on shooting days, while the guns had their port and stilton in here. Helen says he’s the finest botanical draughtsman since the eighteenth century. But you know her. And,’ said Benjie, ‘the wonder is, after all that fuss, it looks as though he’s straight.’

  Antony, who knew otherwise, disengaged himself and was taken to the bosom of a large woman swathed in saffron-tinged embroideries from turbaned head to pointed suede toe. Across the room lovely, silver-gilt Francesca laid her hand on Jack Armstrong’s green velvet sleeve and leant in to murmur. Parties, the magic they can wreak. Jamie, who had been standing with them, beast to their two beauties, turned away.

  And went into the drawing room where the party swirled slowly around two still points. On one of the deep sofas sat a very famous person, ghastly pale, with dyed white hair. He had come with Seb. Everyone in the room was aware of the famous one’s presence. He was one of the totems of the age, one who was said to have defined it (despite the fact that he was so very, very laconic) as well as glittering at its centre. They would talk about this, his appearance among them, for months – in some cases for decades – to come. No one quite knew, for the moment, though, what to do about it.

  Seb scurried about the room, looking for people to talk to his illustrious protégé. Everyone wanted to have done so. No one much relished the prospect of the actual conversation. The famous one sat completely still, blinking frequently. He didn’t turn his head towards those who bravely sat beside him. He answered their questions in a voice rather too low for audibility. How many of his famously gnomic dicta were to be lost that night, unheard beneath the thrum of party chat? A man dressed after the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, in stick-up collar and frock coat and extravagant whiskers, was with him now, wringing his hands as he sought for another conversational gambit.

  Guy, only a few years older than Nell but precociously self-possessed, took his ex-aunt Helen by the elbow, and steered her over.

  ‘May we join you? This is Helen. She’s designed a garden based on the description of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation.’ This was spur-of-the-moment nonsense. The famous one, without smiling or nodding or catching either of their eyes, said, ‘Piquant.’

  The Mad Hatter made a dash for freedom. Guy waved Helen onto the sofa and seated himself on a tapestried stool. ‘Yes, isn’t it marvellous,’ he said, and for the next ten minutes he coaxed Helen to hold forth about Persian gardens and Dutch gardens, about Vauxhall and the lewd goings-on there, and about the Mughal emperor who created a pleasure garden where every enclosure was a flowery prison for a beautiful girl who was forbidden to move or speak until the emperor passed by, and would then break into dance or song.

  Guy leant forward and tapped the famous knee. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said repeatedly. ‘Isn’t that fantastic?’ Helen smiled, and rustled the pointed floor-length sleeves of her metallic dress, and said something about three-dimensional geometry and the fourth dimension of time, about proliferation and decay. This stirred the famous person into speech. ‘Obsolescence,’ he said. They paused deferentially. He had nothing more to say. His eyes closed. Up came a wan young man proffering an exhibition catalogue and asking for an autograph. Guy was on his feet in a trice, graceful, backing off. ‘We mustn’t keep you from your admirers.’

  ‘That poor man,’ he said to Helen as they retreated towards the dining room. ‘Did you see his fingernails? Positively corrugated.’

  ‘Poor? He’s got everything he wants, surely?’

  ‘Yes yes but imagine what a bore – all the nosey-parkers and scroungers. And the people telling him how much they admire him, as though he ought to be interested in their silly opinions. At least we gave him fifteen minutes during which he didn’t have to speak at all.’

  ‘Oh Guy, no one ever has to speak when you’re about.’

  Guy laughed, and squeezed Helen’s upper arm and drifted off towards the room’s other centripetal attraction, an enormously fat, elderly black woman, a blues diva with a hoarse holler of a laugh and an iridescent Lurex dress which flowed off her like oil.

  Back on the sofa the pale youth was pulling a sketchbook from his pocket. Before the night was out he would have received an invitation to America. By the end of the year he would be being stared at by scores of guests he’d never previously met, the very famous person lurking beside him, at the opening of his first New York show.

  *

  Nell and Selim were in the room where, over a decade ago, their host had first attempted to kiss the hostess. Selim’s voice was very deep for such a slight young man. He tended to look askance as he talked, which meant Nell couldn’t always hear what he was saying. She had been a forthright child, but with adolescence she had been afflicted with an
anxiety to please that hobbled her. She hated the way she laughed at boys’ jokes even when she didn’t get the point of them.

  Selim had not spoken in that week’s seminar. He very seldom did. Student discussions seemed to him irritatingly jejune. When he finished his degree (history) he was destined for a place in the police department in Lahore that was likely to lead, saving upsets, to very high office. His sojourn in a damp, world-famous, half-medieval city, golden in prospect but so small and pettifogging to the near view, was to be a mere interlude in his life, a kind of trial from which he would return tempered ready for use. That, at least, was his family’s intention, one that no one had ever thought to question until, just around this time, it had begun to occur to Selim that he might perhaps become something else entirely. He felt so cosmopolitan, so interestingly suspended between two cultures. With such an anomalous perspective he could, he thought, be a novelist. Or a singer-songwriter perhaps. To the latter end, he was learning to play the guitar.

  ‘Is he dead, do you think?’ asked Guy, joining them. No need to ask whom he meant. An assassination attempt had been made, not long ago, on the famous guest.

  ‘Whether or not, it doesn’t seem as though it would make much difference,’ said Nell. She liked Guy. He was older than her other Oxford friends, because he’d bummed around a bit before coming up. He didn’t take much notice of her, but they had Wychwood in common, which meant she knew him in a different way from the people who’d landed in her life with no back story, like aliens or angels. Funny how much easier it was to talk to men who were queer.

  ‘Why do we all stare at him?’ asked Selim.

  ‘Well he’s answered that question himself, hasn’t he, in five different media,’ said Guy. ‘We’re conformists. We stare because all the rest are staring.’

  There was a sudden blare of music from the marble hall. The crowd eddied and jostled as a couple came through, silent and fierce, their joined hands extended to form a prow. They were dancing a tango, dipping and rearing in tight shiny clothes, their faces impassive. Flora had seen them cutting through the mob at Tramps and invited them before she even knew their names. Was it exploitative or generous of her to blur the line, like that, between guests and floorshow? She neither knew nor cared.

  People shuffled aside. Benjie, with his back to the dancers, was gesticulating effusively as he brought to a close an anecdote about his mother (Italian, chosen model of several artists of half a century back). One of his flying hands was on course to give the oncoming female dancer a backhanded slap in the face. She swayed away from it. Her partner made a swift adjustment, and swung her round so that she seemed to fly almost horizontal, her hennaed hair sweeping the floor beneath Benjie’s arm. He skipped, looked around nonplussed and, seeing the others laughing at him, waved them over and introduced them to a woman wearing an enormous veiled hat stuck with silk roses.

  Guy said to Nell, ‘I need some air. Let’s go and howl at the moon.’

  Nell didn’t want to move away from Selim. She yearned towards him, as a geranium yearns towards a window. But he was talking about Palestine to the hat woman, ignoring her, so …

  Damask curtains the silvery green of willow leaves. Shutters folded back into their embrasures. French windows chilly to the touch.

  ‘Just a little respite from being amusing,’ said Guy. ‘Let’s visit those sinister fish.’

  In the starlight the canal glimmered. A furrow cut the jetty surface, a pallid shape beneath.

  ‘Aren’t they horrific?’

  Nell had always thought so. She said, ‘I didn’t know you were such friends with Antony.’ She had seen them hugging as they greeted each other.

  Guy looked at her sideways. ‘My pretend uncle,’ he said, ‘by which I don’t mean what you might think I mean. He was kind to me in Berlin when I was doing my Wandervögel thing before Oxford.’

  ‘What might I think?’

  ‘Oh Uncle Ant is a man of many mysteries,’ said Guy.

  They were on their way back across the lawn now. Antony was visible through the glazed door. Narrow shoulders, narrow hips, his velvet jacket buttoned up, greying hair brushed straight back, a tall man without any of the loose-limbed shambliness of tall Christopher, or tall Guy for that matter. He is exact, thought Nell. He always stands exactly upright, with his weight on both feet. Hardly anyone else does that. What an effort it must take.

  *

  In taking up with Benjie, Flora had become a hostess. Still in her teens, while most of her girlfriends ate cooked food only when taken out to restaurants by men, she had a kitchen, and a dining table. Benjie’s friends had houses in Tuscany and Provence, to which he took her. Always the youngest woman in the house-party (except the au pair), she learnt to tease men, and she discovered how good food could be. Benjie, restaurateur and gourmet, approved. He fed her baby artichokes steeped in green olive oil, and chicken livers on crostini, and slivers of real Parmesan cheese, while to most of her former flatmates Parmesan was still a granular substance which came in a cardboard cylinder and carried a whiff of vomit.

  In London she cooked stews under a variety of fashionable names – daube, fricassée, blanquette, ragoût, goulash, hotpot, casserole, pot au feu, kleftiko, tagine. In the Swan Walk kitchen, listening to Dusty Springfield and Procul Harum and Disraeli Gears, she chopped onions until the tears ran, bashed bay leaves and coriander seeds in a stone pestle, and then, for pudding, reverted to the cooking habits of the rationing generation, crumbling digestive biscuits and topping them off with tinned condensed milk.

  Come night, the flat would fill up. Her friends: boys in denim, girls in leather and broderie anglaise, all of them grateful to know someone who had a place big enough to gather in. Benjie’s friends: argumentative men; women who either kept their distance from her, loyal to Helen, or patronised her as a pet. She draped the table and sofas with embroidered felt hangings. She lit dozens of candles and stuck them in Moorish lanterns or in vases of red bohemian glass. She sat on the window seat, silk robes hitched up over bare legs, and scolded Guy, her almost-nephew and indispensible cavalier servente, who was so much nearer to her in age than Benjie was, when he put ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida’ on the record player for the twelfth time in a night.

  Benjie allowed it. Sometimes he would go tetchily and early to bed, bored by the company, annoyed if they failed to pay enough attention to him, or to notice how good his wine was. But he renamed his restaurant ‘Flora’s’ and let her loose on it. Out went the pink damask tablecloths and gold-rimmed plates. In came pews salvaged from bombed-out churches and pine tables wavy from decades of scrubbing, unmatched ironstone dishes and pewter tankards stuffed with ox-eye daisies and foxgloves and, in winter, copper-coloured chrysanthemums, their acrid tang prickling in air already sharp with woodsmoke from the open fire. And in came men without ties, without collars even, and barefoot girls in their grandmothers’ tattered lace bodices and great-grandmothers’ garnets. They’d have been turned away from the place a couple of years earlier: now they were desirable customers. Some of them, barely out of their teens, were world-famous.

  Benjie went into partnership with a young architect, a Polish count. There was, they discovered, good money to be made from teaching the rich how to make themselves and their houses look picturesquely rumpled. And when Wychwood became Flora’s plaything, Benjie, without ever explicitly telling her he was doing so, used it as bait for business. It was he who had invited the maharajah. There were three palaces in Rajasthan waiting to be converted into hotels.

  *

  Jamie and Guy sat on the stairs. They’d met through Cherwell. Guy wrote a gossip column, ‘The Ligger’, that was, in Jamie’s view, preposterously mannered as to style and despicable as to content but, well, it was a relief to have found someone here he knew.

  Jamie wore what he always wore. Corduroy Levi’s, desert boots, T-shirt, denim bomber jacket. The whole point of this outfit was its ordinariness. Now it was making him feel conspicuous, and that got him angry wit
h everyone else present – although they probably didn’t give a toss about his appearance – and angry with himself for minding about something as trivial as clothes. He didn’t know how Guy fitted in at Wychwood, but it was obvious he did, somehow. He kept, even while they talked, giving little fluttery waves to people walking past. Jamie found it maddening. It also irritated him that Guy seemed not to care that they both held empty glasses. Jamie wanted to go and get a refill. Through the dining-room door he could see a kind of marble trough in which bottles were embedded in ice. He didn’t dare move, though, in case Guy wandered off and he found himself spare again.

  They’d both been dancing. Guy with Flora, Jamie with Nell.

  Guy never joined any teams or played ball games, but he was an athlete. He won races, his long, sparse hair trailing out behind him like the lines cartoonists use to denote a whoosh of speed. He could dance expertly for hours on end, with small controlled twitches of elbow, shoulder and hip. Jamie’s style was more pugnacious. He met the music with his fists up, and hurled himself at it, hardly ever glancing at his partners. When the discotheque began playing T. Rex he’d snorted and stalked off. Nell started after him, then checked when she realised he wasn’t going to look back. The idea of good manners might seem antiquated, but dealing with someone who didn’t have any was really hard. Benjie – watchful host – introduced her to a pair of talkative male twins in sequinned denim waistcoats who clearly had no interest in getting to know her, but at least saved her from standing around shamingly alone.

  ‘Why Berlin?’ Jamie was asking.

  ‘Jamie dear, the question is why not? Why aren’t you going? Why aren’t we all there? It’s just throbbing! The orgy capital of the world!’

  It was never easy to tell when Guy was sending himself up.

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘Lord knows. There’ll be somewhere. There are advantages to being a queen, you know.’

  ‘And what will you do?’

  Jamie meant ‘How will you make money?’ but he knew to ask that straight out would be uncool. His own parents (a teacher and a district nurse) had seen him through Oxford – proud to do so – but the allowance they gave him would be stopped the day the summer term ended. No way was he going to be able to wander off to a throbbing European capital to inhale the atmosphere. How on earth did everyone manage? Guy had just told him he was going to save money by going abroad. Had these people never heard of airfares? Jamie didn’t even know how he’d get back to Glasgow. Well, he did know. He’d hitch.